There used to be a time when people were trying to reproduce at home the computer environment that was available at work. Office PCs were more powerful, had software that fulfilled all sorts of needs, and access to broadband Internet at no cost.

This era has long been over. Nowadays, most people drive a Porsche at home and a Skoda at the office. Back in New York City a year ago, where I was working as a financial auditor, I was granted with a crappy old Dell laptop that took about 7 minutes to boot and a decade or so to launch the accounting and auditing software we used. The end result that was I was always carrying around the United States 2 laptops: my professional laptop, and my personal one – to at least do my personal stuff and even process my audit reports in decent conditions at night. No so handy a situation…Anyways, looking back, no matter the PC, I took part of the audit process 17 different companies in 8 different States in America. Not bad, is it?

Let’s move back to the topics that interests us most here: home vs. office.

The Web 2.0 (see my definition of Web 2.0 here) used to a consumer-only buzzword until recently. But employees have been pushing hard to take it to the next level: the workplace.

Here’s a sample of 4, oops, 5 (see below) recent initiatives aiming at linking enterprise software with Web 2.0:

• Microsoft Dynamics now available in ASP mode: not only is the new release of Dynamics fully integrated with Vista and Office 2007, you may also develop business mash-ups between Office & Dynamics fully adapting to your specific business needs, or even 100% Web 2.0 apps like Windows Live Local integrating within vertical Dynamics solutions. Dynamics AX 4.0 integrated an excellent RSS feeder and uses the AIF web services framework, and, last but not least, CRM web service APIs allow for independent developments on CRM SharePoint.

• Google Apps, Premium Edition: everybody’s been writing about Google Apps recently. Many people miss the point. I’m certain it’s a great tool, but most companies can’t yet afford to use their software and store their data online as many Internet service provider networks aren’t yet fully reliable. I’m sure, as for most of the tools going at from Google Labs, that Google Apps is a good mix of collaborative tools, spreadsheet and word processor. However, I can’t see Google Apps, and even the Premium Edition of it, target anything else than small businesses (like SoHo workers: Small Office, Home Office) – making it compete mostly with free fat client software suite Open Office, the online version of MS Office and several tools available here and there on the Internet. 2 conclusions to be drawn: 1) Great move from Google, their SaaS portfolio is getting everyday more consistent and broad in terms of functional scope; 2) despite a rather unclear positioning, never underestimate Google, there should be more to come, possibly targeting more seriously the key-account market.

• Cognos buying out Celequest in Jan 2007: Celequest is a well-known Software as a Service company based in Redwood City, California. The Canadian software company aims at integrating into its business intelligence solutions features like the live SAP or SalesForce service-oriented dashboards using Ajax.

• Oracle’s Web Center Suite: WebCenter Suite enables Java developers to build Web 2.0 plug-ins on top of its traditional enterprise software Web 2.0 features such as wikis, blogs, instant messengers and search tools. This market is sort of booming, with excellent self-standing solutions appearing on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean: US company eTouch Systems offering online collaborative tools mainly based on wikis, and French promising start up BlueKiwi which has developed a fat client intra-organization knowledge management environment built on a blogging platform.

• IBM (update Friday, March 2nd 2007): sorry, how could I forget IBM’s enterprise networking initiative? Named LotusConnections, this enterprise social software suite allows for mapping employee profiles, tagging and common interest linking, bookmark sharing tools based from IBM Research’s famous Dogear, and last but not least, private blog rooms of course.

This is only the beginning of the Enterprise solutions 2.0 trend. I didn’t mention any open source software here, but I heard somewhere SugarCRM has also been getting ready for the battle.

More on enterprise 2.0 soon. In the meantime, help me understand why enterprise software stocks are trading so low if they’re to benefit from the growth of the Web 2.0 market.

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